Figure 1.--These students belong to the Ilnau Secondary School, a village near Zurich. There was only one secondary school in the town, so it merely takes its name from the village. The very proper-looking
teacher, Herr Ernst, stands in the rear wearing a wing collar and tie with a watch chain on his waistcoat. The photo was taken November 27, 1934. Most of the boys seem to be wearing heavy woolen sweaters with
short trousers and long stockings, black or brown. One boy in the second row wears heather-style of speckled wool stockings that go well with the figured knit of his sweater. At least three of the boys have
graduated to long trousers, but they seem to be in the minority. Many of the girls wear pigtails.
Some information is available on individual Swiss schools, showing both the various styles worn by the boys and available information on the school regulations. The information is abstracted from the available images, but some information is available on the several different schools. These schools are mostly from the French-speaking catons. It is likely that boys in the Italian catons also wore smocks, but HBC at this time does not have any information on these schools.
Here you can search through our archive of Swiss schools alphabetically. Here you can easily check on a specific school. Many schools did not have names, but took on the name of the neigborhood or village where they were located. Some city city schools tokk the names of the street where they were located. We have several schools archived, but of course is only a small fraction of Swiss schools. We incourage readers to contrinute any information they can recall about their schools. Here photographs are wonderful, but not absolutely required. These individual school pages help expand our coverage and understanding both about the academic program as well as school fashions in the many different schools around the country. Raders who find their schools in our archive are incouraged to add information about the school.
We have sorted the Swiss school listings chronologically. This is useful in learning how school and schoolwear trends varied over time. We will group them by decades to see what the major fashions were in each decade. At this time we mostly have information about the 20th century, but we eventually hope to add 19th century infirmatiin as well.
